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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27609413">Bang</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tobiyos/pseuds/tobiyos'>tobiyos</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Persona 5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Persona 5 Spoilers, Third Semester (Persona 5), hurt/comfort but the comfort is kinda ehhh, is that a tag, references to murder</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 04:42:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,156</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27609413</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tobiyos/pseuds/tobiyos</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“What was it like?” Ren asks.</p><p>“What was what like?” Akechi says, not unkindly. Ren normally appreciates Sojiro’s choice to keep the lights dimmed towards closing, but Akechi looks too soft in warm colors, haloed by the smell of coffee and the spices from the curry. Ren puts his hands into the pockets on his apron.</p><p>“When you killed me,” he says quietly.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>116</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Bang</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Happy 11/20! I, uh, was gonna work on more stuff for Shuake week but I kind of got possesed and wanted to write for other stuff so... oops. But! I realized that all of the stuff Akechi says to Ren in the interrogation room Ren doesn't actually get to hear and... well...</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“What was it like?” Ren asks.</p><p>He regrets it almost the second he says it, watches Akechi’s face twist into one of confusion as his coffee cup gets set down on the counter in Leblanc. It’s a stupid, stupid thing he thinks about sometimes, he shouldn’t have—</p><p>“What was what like?” Akechi asks, not unkindly. Ren normally appreciates Sojiro’s choice to keep the lights dimmed towards closing, but Akechi looks too soft in warm colors, haloed by the smell of coffee and the spices from the curry. Ren puts his hands into the pockets on his apron.</p><p>“When you killed me,” he says quietly.</p><p>Akechi doesn’t freeze. He’s effortless in everything he does, doesn’t really bat an eye at Ren’s statement, but Ren doesn’t know how long they have in Maruki’s fucked up reality. He spends all of his time watching Akechi, afraid for the moment he slips out of his fingers—the way Maruki took Wakaba, took Okumura, swept Shiho’s feet out from underneath her, he thinks guilty—but he’s seen enough of Akechi in the past few weeks to notice the slight pull to his lips, the way his vision goes from hazily unfocused on nothing to sharp, like he can piece together an answer in the bookcase to Ren’s side.</p><p>“Do you really want to know?” His voice is dark, a drop away from the little detective prince act, some of his venom seeping through. “I’ve told you I don’t regret it.”</p><p>“I know,” Ren says, and goes back to drying some plate he’s been working at for too long. “But…” But <em>what</em>, Ren? You haven’t actually had the chance to talk about this outside of passing comments? Haven’t told him you have nightmares with needles and cell blocks but he’s never there, not even among the faces that are too blurry to make out? Ren <em>never</em> saw him, not between the interrogation room and Shido’s ship. He saw Akechi’s careful mask cracking underneath Shido’s gilded hull and then <em>nothing</em>, and now Goro is sitting in his caretaker’s café, but he won’t talk to him, and Ren just keeps drying some stupid fucking plate.</p><p>“It was a job,” Akechi says, and his voice sounds empty, like it’s ringing hollow around Leblanc and back into the space. He traces the edge of his cup with a finger. “One name on a list, albeit I’d interacted with you more. I didn’t—”</p><p>“No,” Ren interrupts, because he’s <em>heard</em> this before. He knows Akechi is avoiding letting himself think about <em>whatever</em> he wants, is still filing this under a thin veneer of <em>I don’t regret it, so it’s fine</em>. “What was it like?”</p><p>He doesn’t say <em>show me</em>. Akechi reads it in his gaze anyway.</p><p>“What do you want from me?” Akechi asks, and Ren feels something uncoil in his chest, work through his heart up to his mouth.</p><p>It’s the month of dancing around each other, of fighting side by side and patching wounds and meeting Akechi at bars in Kichijoji to say nothing, to sit at opposite sides of a table and let history work through them. Ren thinks about the handsome boy he’d met at the television station, with bright eyes and dark gloves and that infuriating, self-important laugh he toted on his shoulders like a shield, the look behind his eyes when he’d fought Ren in the Metaverse.</p><p>He has a thousand memories trailing him at the heel when he walks around the counter, stands behind Goro’s chair and puts fingertips gentle against Goro’s fluttering heartbeat in his neck. “What was it like?” he says one more time, and Akechi takes a breath that shakes and then rattles out of him.</p><p>“I killed your guard before I even saw you,” he says pleasantly, standing from his seat to spin around. Ren stares at the edge of Goro’s lengthening bangs instead of his eyes, because he doesn’t trust himself to follow through on this, curiosity be damned, if Goro is going to hate him for it. So, he stares at Goro’s bangs, and moves backwards when Goro steps forward, until his hips are pressed against the edge of a table behind him. “He went down like a <em>bitch</em>,” Goro sneers, and he’s close enough to touch, but Ren won’t, not when he needs to listen.</p><p>Goro tugs at the edge of his gloves and glances off somewhere behind Ren’s head. “Even when you saw me, you barely responded, just twitched like someone had dropped a book in front of you. I should have known,” he spits, but Akira says nothing. He has nothing to say to the venom in his eyes, even when he notices Akechi’s hands are trembling, just slightly. He tugs at his gloves again like he’s trying to take the attention away from it. He gaze swings back to Ren’s and his jaw sets tightly, face unreadable. “But I had to gloat, and monologue, flaunt my victory over you even as your eyes sat empty. I thought it was strange, but I knew what the police did to you. I figured you were drugged out of your mind, and I didn’t even care if you heard me, but you did have to listen. You let me wave that gun around and you <em>sat</em> there.”</p><p>Ren exhales through his mouth, too loud, he thinks, for the way Akechi’s eyes catch on his lips. He remembers sitting, quite a bit of sitting, and dreading that he might actually see Akechi enter the room, that he’d failed spectacularly and the last thing he’d see before he’d die would be brown, brown, the dark amber of Akechi’s eyes and the tan of his coat and the red of his mouth.</p><p>There’s a hand on Ren’s chest then, pushing him backwards, and Ren goes, leans backwards over the table until his spine stretches tight, his core working hard to keep him on his feet. Akechi holds him there, moves his other hand and clenches it into a crude gun shape, before he presses his rough hands to Ren’s forehead.</p><p>“There was nothing in your eyes when I pressed the barrel of a gun to your face, and you barely changed in death.” His nails are digging into Ren’s skin even through the material of his gloves. Quietly, he whispers, “<em>Bang.”</em> and his fingers knock against Ren’s forehead, and <em>bang</em>, Ren thinks, he’s dead on a table.</p><p><em>Bang,</em> he thinks when he fists his hands into Akechi’s shirt. <em>Bang,</em> when he crashes their mouths together. <em>Bang,</em> when Akechi kisses him back. <em>Bang, bang, bang.</em></p><p>“I wanted to kill you,” Akechi says into his mouth.</p><p>“I wanted to save you,” Ren breathes back.</p><p>Akechi puts his hands around the sides of Ren’s neck, but he doesn’t push, doesn’t squeeze, just holds them there like he’s feeling for Ren’s stuttering pulse. “I think we both fucked up rather spectacularly.”</p><p>It's all Ren can do to kiss him again.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Bang.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks for reading! I'm on <a href="https://twitter.com/tobi_yos">twitter</a> if you wanna come say hi :]</p></blockquote></div></div>
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